TOKYO -- Japan has confirmed its 26th mad cow disease case, this one
in a 5-year-old Holstein in the country's north, the Agriculture Ministry
said on Saturday.

Meat inspectors in the northern prefecture
(state) of Hokkaido found on Thursday that a dairy cow tested positive
for the disease, the ministry said in a statement.

A panel of Agriculture Ministry experts
confirmed the infection Saturday, according to ministry official Akiko
Suzuki.

"All meat, internal organs and parts
from this cattle will be incinerated, and there is no danger that they
will be circulated in the market," the ministry statement said.

The confirmation comes as Japanese and
US officials are set to meet as early as next week to discuss lifting
Tokyo's ban on American beef, the countries said earlier this week.

Japan initially banned US beef in December
2003, following the first discovery of mad cow disease in the United States.

That ban was eased last December to allow
the importation of meat from cows aged 20 months or less - seen as posing
a lower risk of having the disease - but the ban was later tightened following
the faulty beef shipment in January.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform
encephalopathy, is a degenerative nerve disease in cattle. Eating contaminated
meat products has been linked to the rare but fatal human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease.